NAMED RANGES

A named range in Excel can represent a single cell, a row, a column, or a selection of cells. Using named ranges refers to assigning a descriptive name to a cell or range in order to make your spreadsheet’s formulas easier to read and understand. Excel named ranges can be created, modified and deleted in the Excel Name Manager in the Formulas menu. Continue reading to learn how to create a named range.

Accessing the Excel Name Manager:

Creating a Named Range

After clicking on the Name Manager in the Formulas tab, the following dialogue box opens. Click New to create your first named range.

Clicking the New button launches the following dialogue box:

There are four components to naming a range:

Name: Enter a description for your named range. Don’t use spaces in the name — instead use underscores to separate words, if needed.Scope: This allows you to choose where the Named Range will be valid. The default is the entire workbook; however, you can choose specific sheets in your workbook, if needed.Comment: This section allows you to enter a description of the named rangeRefers to: This is where you specify the cell or range to be named.

Clicking on OK will create the named range. In this example we named the cell A1 “New_Named_Range”. As you can see in the screen shot below, when cell A1 is selected Excel now refers to the cell as “New_Named_Range”. Going forward if you want to refer to cell A1 in a formula you can now use the name “New_Named_Range”